[FFmpeg-devel] Discussion related to the use of a global thread pool rather than the current threading model

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

On 8 January 2016 at 23:27, wm4 <nfxjfg at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Then don't create 30 threads.

This was just a silly example...

There are time when you do want to use multiple threads, because
someone is playing a single high-def video and a single thread
wouldn't cut it.
The conditions could change dynamically too:
Say you had a thread pool of 8 threads ; when you have a single video
to play, it can make full use of the processor. Something you can't
achieve if you didn't create any threads at all.

Now create a new decoder, they are still sharing the same pool, so about 4 each.

The point is that as your amount of decoders climb there aren't an
negative effect as opposed to not creating new thread, while when the
decoder count drops: improvements do kick in.

The advantages are so many that I'm even surprised I have to mention
it... It's so obvious.

Thread pools / task queues aren't messy. It's the modern approach
taken by almost all highly parallelised and efficient applications.

We certainly use them a lot in gecko (and webkit too)